


into a deep dark wood

by glorious_spoon



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Creepy, Horror, M/M, Monsters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:41:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26415106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: Alec only loses track of Magnus for a moment.
Relationships: Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood
Comments: 36
Kudos: 108





	into a deep dark wood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [darknutmeg](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darknutmeg/gifts).



> For Meghan, who donated in the [Equality Auction](https://equalityauction.dreamwidth.org/) fundraiser in support of Black Lives Matter, and requested creepy psychological horror. I hope this suits, and I'm sorry it took forever!
> 
> Many thanks to June for beta-reading!

He only loses track of Magnus for a moment.

They’re in the tunnels below the subway on the track of a disruption in the ley lines—or rather, Magnus is. Alec is there because, despite what Magnus says, he does occasionally need someone to watch his back while he’s working complicated magic in a potentially dangerous situation, and as Alec isn’t a warlock, he won’t disrupt the flow overmuch.

That, and it’s been a hell of a week, and he wants to hang out with his husband, even if it is a work-date.

“You’re so romantic,” Magnus says dryly when Alec tells him this, but he’s smiling. Alec opens his mouth to say something, there’s a rattling, clicking noise, and an instant later a pair of Shax demons burst out of an unseen tunnel toward them.

Magic flares from Magnus’s fingers, and Alec’s bow is in his hands an instant later. Together they move into the fray.

The battle is brutal but quick. A few minutes later Alec is stooping to pull his arrows from the dead demon’s head, kicking over the one that Magnus dispatched to make sure that it’s actually dead, and it’s only when he straightens up and looks around that he realizes Magnus is nowhere to be found.

“Magnus?” Alec calls. His voice echoes in the stone tunnels, but less than it should. There’s a heavy, shrouded quality to the air that seems to swallow sound. Alec spins, and, finding nothing but darkness, activates his vision rune, blinking as the darkened corridor seems to brighten. There’s a thin mist rising off the floor that he doesn’t remember being there a moment before, and Magnus is nowhere to be seen.

It was just a pair of Shax demons, Alec thinks, but his heart is speeding like he’s been sprinting. It was just Shax demons, and they killed them both, so Magnus is fine. Must be fine.

A moment later, there’s a clatter up ahead. Light shifts, soft glowing globes of illumination rising up to drift in the darkness up ahead. The mist seems thicker now, but a moment later Alec hears Magnus call, “Up here.”

He breathes out hard and lets his grip on his bow relax. “I was calling for you, didn’t you hear me? Did you find something?”

“Here,” Magnus replies. It takes several strides for Alec to catch up enough to see him, a broad-shouldered shadow in the rising mist. The glow has faded again, but with his rune active Alec can still see perfectly well. Magnus seems unhurt; he’s moving fast, his boots splashing on the wet floor. Alec lengthens his stride again, but he can’t seem to catch up. The water is becoming deeper, becoming thick and muddy, although there’s no sign of a current to account for it. It’s like wading through a swamp. Smells like one, too.

Magnus still isn’t slowing. There’s a faint light coming from up ahead of him, but it’s not the familiar blue of his magic, so they must be getting close to the disrupted ley line. That pallid glow seems unnatural, disturbed. Alec unholsters his bow again, an unease he can’t explain thrumming through him.

“Magnus, wait up.”

Magnus slows briefly. He turns back toward Alec, his smile sharp, his eyes and jewelry flashing golden a moment before the mist swallows him up again.

“Magnus?” Alec calls. There’s something cold unspooling inside him, an uneasy tension that has nothing to do with the alertness of a dangerous patrol. This is icy and unsettling, the squirming horror of a child waking to see monsters crouching in the shadows of his room.

Alec has been dealing with monsters for his whole life, and there’s nothing here to be afraid of that he can see, but the feeling still remains.

“Magnus?” he calls again. This time, there’s an answer.

“Come on, Alexander. This way.”

Magnus’s voice has a faintly echoing quality to it, but Alec is too busy fighting his way through the sucking mud, which is close to ankle-deep by now, to think much of it. He can see Magnus up ahead, a dark shadow wavering through the silvery mist, and the cold thing inside him settles a little. He lengthens his stride to follow, glad that his boots are waterproof.

A few minutes later, it doesn’t matter. They’re actively wading now, the mud thinned out to a soupy swamp that soaks his jeans and seeps in over the tops of his boots.

It reeks, but not in the way that Alec would expect the sludge in a New York City sewer to reek; this is a green and rotting stink that belongs in a deep still forest, and he can feel weeds growing beneath the water ( _out of the concrete?_ he wonders with that unease that he can’t fully explain to himself). They tangle around his boots as he moves, threatening to trip him up.

“Magnus,” he pants, squinting at the dark shape moving up ahead. “Magnus, wait. Slow down.”

Magnus’s voice drifts back to him. “Hurry up.”

“I’m hurrying, I just—”

He takes a step, only to find that there’s no _ground_ beneath his foot, just endless icy water. Alec sinks down and down and down, dark water closing over his head and flooding his mouth and lungs. He kicks hard, tangles of weeds twisting over his legs and hands and face like strong, fibrous fingers trying to pull him down.

He finally breaks the surface, coughing and trying to drag air back into his abused lungs.

“Magnus,” he gasps. “ _Magnus_.”

There are no quick footsteps, no warm hands to grasp at him, no prickle of blue magic or worried voice. There’s only silence and the slosh of water, and Alec realizes with a low deep chill that nothing around him looks familiar. The concrete walls of the subway tunnel are gone; the broken lights in the sconces, the pale scribbles of graffiti. Around him is a dark forest lit only by the thin sliver of a moon overhead. Towering trees lean over the water, choked with hanging vines, and there’s an eerie drone of insects in the air.

The puddle that he stumbled into a moment ago is a broad pond, stagnant and choked with weeds. Clearly, he’s fallen through a portal of some sort, although nothing here looks familiar, and there’s an unsettling quality to the place that he can’t put his finger on, one that makes him suspect that he hasn’t slipped into another part of the mortal plane. This seems… older. Hungrier.

A shiver goes through Alec, but he shrugs it off. The first order of business is getting to shore, and finding Magnus. He can worry about the rest of it later.

It isn’t easy to swim in boots, and his stele, when he grapples for it, seems to have vanished from its holder. That doesn’t make Alec feel any better about his circumstances, especially since he’s pretty sure he just felt something slither past his legs. Nothing sinks its teeth into him, though, and nothing grabs at him other than the weeds, which he is seriously starting to suspect of sentience. He’s in sight of the low, sloping shoreline when there’s a splash somewhere to his left. A heavy splash, like something human-sized just hit the water. Alec spins clumsily, but there’s nothing there. Ripples are moving out from the center of the pond, though, splashing him in the face with cold, muddy water. He spits the taste of slime from his lips and peers around. “Who’s there?”

There’s another splash, from his other side this time. A soft thud, like something heavy has just landed on the bank. A rustle of wet grass, and a warm, familiar spill of laughter. It should be comforting, but it has the opposite effect. The cold thing twisting in the pit of Alec’s stomach grows teeth, because that—

That sounded like Magnus.

“Magnus,” he gasps, spinning toward it. There’s no one there on the bank, but the weeds are high and tangled. A tall man—a man of Magnus’s height—could crouch down and hide in them. If he were so inclined.

“ _Magnus_ ,” Alec says again, splashing toward the shore. He feels soft, sucking mud beneath his boots, but it won’t take his weight. Like the weeds, it seems to be _pulling_ at him. He goes under again, then splashes up out of the water, swiping at his eyes. “Who’s there? Show yourself.”

“Who’s there?” echoes the voice that isn’t, that _cannot_ be Magnus. It sounds like him. It sounds exactly like him. But there’s just no way, not here, not in this moment, not with that cold, gleeful, mocking tone. Even at his cruelest, Magnus has never sounded like that. “Who’s there? Show yourself.”

Shivering balls of light rise out of the weeds, glowing pale and illuminating not much more than the moon, as Alec drags himself up the bank. He grasps for his seraph blade, then lets it go. This place is evil, but he doesn’t think it’s demonic evil. It’s something else, something green and growing that reminds him of the Seelie Court, with it’s dark forests and wandering paths that lead unwary travelers astray.

There’s a blade of cold iron in his boot, shielded by silk. He doesn’t reach for it yet, but he crouches down so that it’s near at hand as the weeds finally part and— _something_ —steps out onto the bank.

Alec recoils so hard that he nearly falls on his ass in the water. Weeds pull at him, and the mud beneath him sinks, and he _is_ falling then, struggling and helpless as the creature approaches and squats down to contemplate him.

It wasn’t Magnus that he was following, Alec thinks numbly. Not since the Shax demons, maybe not since the start of all this.

The thing crouching over him is black-haired and golden-eyed, but its face, its _face—_

It looks like it was molded out of soft clay by someone with only a rudimentary idea of what faces should look like. The jaw is a blob, the nose a featureless bump. The mouth is lipless, and as Alec watches in frozen horror, it splits open into a grin that spreads and spreads until he thinks that it means to unzip its entire jaw and swallow him whole. Rows upon rows of silver teeth gleam like needles set in bloody gums.

It reaches out toward him with one long, misshapen hand, and Alec sees that a familiar ring gleams on its third finger. Something _terrible_ punches through him, and he finds that he has a voice after all. “Who are you? _What_ are you? What did you do with Magnus?”

At that, a rattling hiss escapes the creature. It takes Alec a moment to identify it as laughter, and when he does he renews his struggles, to no avail. The weeds have bound his feet as firmly as iron chains, and the cold sinks into his skin. It’s all he can do to keep his head above water.

He twists, then takes a deep breath and lets himself sink below the water. From above, he can hear a splash, and cold fingers grasp at him. He doesn’t try to break their hold. Instead, he pulls the blade of cold iron from his boot and slashes at the weeds, which wither and shrink away. He strikes at the icy fingers digging into his arm, and there’s a bubbling scream from above, and then he’s free.

Alec kicks hard for the surface, scrambles up the bank, dripping wet and gripping the knife with all his might. The grass withers where the metal touches it, and nothing emerges to drag him back down into the water.

He drags himself up until he’s far enough away from the edge of the water that it’ll be a struggle to drag him back in, then collapses hard on the cold ground. He’s still breathing hard, but his head feels clearer with the blade in his hand. If he has tumbled into one of the Seelie realms—and he must have—an iron blade is about the only defense he’s likely to have against anything here that tries to kill him.

Something rustles in the forest behind him, a crackling of sticks and a cold gust of wind. Alec jerks his head back to look at it—he’s not thrilled about having the forest at his back, either, although unlike the pond nothing in there has actually tried to kill him yet—and when he looks back, Magnus is emerging from the shallows not five yards away from him.

Alec’s heart kicks hard in his chest as he scrambles to his feet. It’s not Magnus, of course. Now that he _knows_ , it’s easy to tell. The cold tilt to the smile, the sheen to his skin, as though it’s made out of fine scales. The pupils of his eyes are slitted the wrong way, like a goat’s rather than a cat’s.

This isn’t Magnus. It isn’t. But it looks so much like him that Alec has to swallow down bile.

He grips the hilt of the knife hard, but the creature doesn’t come closer. It stops in the shallows, then tilts its head up at him with a contemplative look. Its knuckles are bleeding from where Alec slashed them, which should feel satisfying but just makes him feel sick.

“You’re a púca,” he says slowly. The floating lights, the shapeshifting. He should have seen it sooner. Should have realized before he followed this thing down into the tunnels and through to the Seelie realms, but it’s too late for that. “Aren’t you.”

Again the creature smiles, stretching Magnus’s lips into a grin that’s too wide and too sharp, showing needle-pointed teeth. Alec doesn’t allow himself to shudder.

“Was it ever Magnus with me tonight?”

“Was it ever Magnus? Was it ever Magnus?” the creature echoes, still grinning that horrible grin. “You didn’t care earlier. Do you follow every pretty thing you see down into the darkness, Alexander Lightwood?”

“I don’t have time for riddles,” Alec snaps. It was Magnus at the loft, he knows that. It was. The thing he followed after they fought the Shax demons might not have been, but Magnus was there with him when they went down into the tunnels. “What did you do with him?”

“You think you’re the only one we can fool with a pretty picture?” the púca asks, and then it’s shifting and stretching, its hair shortening, its form lengthening, until Alec is staring at his own face mirrored back at him, grinning with needle-sharp teeth. “He’s followed his own will o’ the wisp to where we want him to go. He won’t come looking for you, now or ever.”

It begins to shift again, shedding Alec’s face for something massive and inhuman, shaggy and dark: a swayback horse, dripping water, its eyes gleaming like cold moons and sharp rows of teeth crowding its mouth. Alec shifts his stance, gripping the knife like there’s any way he could fight the púca off like this, but it doesn’t charge him. Instead, it makes a noise unsettlingly like Magnus’s warm laugh, then spins and gallops away across the surface of the water to vanish into the gathering dark, leaving Alec alone.

He’s trapped somewhere in the Seelie realm, with no more weapon than a small knife, and he’s all alone.

Or rather, he wishes he were. He can hear the trees rustling, scattered laughter, high and eerie. Somewhere in the far distance there’s the wild, unsteady sound of a fiddle playing a dance reel.

Alec damn well _knows_ better than to go near an Unseelie dancing ring, and that’s all that could be. And that’s assuming he can find his way through the dark woods without something ripping his throat out; even with a blade of cold iron, there’s no guarantee of that.

But if Magnus is there, he’s in just as much trouble as Alec. More, maybe, if he was the one they were really after in the first place, which seems to be the case.

Alec shifts his grip on the knife, kicks away from the weeds that try to grasp at his ankles, and starts walking.


End file.
